Boiling a hard drive!

One guy had a hard drive failure. He tried all the standard recovery tips, and then thought to boil it. And it worked.

How I recovered my hard drive by double-boiling it

Recuva

This is the best free program I’ve found for data recovery.And it’s free, too!  (Uh, didn’t I just say that? Well it’s free, at least! Oh dang, said it again.)

Recuva.

Recovery Toolbox for CD

If you have a scratched CD (and it’s not scratched to the point where the CD drive can’t detect it!) you may have luck with Recovery Toolbox for CD. As well as Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier, I’ve had luck recovering files. (It does have a habit of freezing sometimes when trying to pull a file. Just keep clicking on “Skip” until it responds.)

Data Recovery — or Head Swap

Ever wonder how they recover data on physically damaged hard drives?

DISCLAIMER: Don’t try this at home!!

CRC errors? Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier to the rescue!

I had all my data backed on on DVD-RWs, ready to be restored. However, I wasn’t expecting the disc to ‘jump’ out of the drive, get caught, and end up scratched. Got a bunch of CRC errors trying to copy. I remembered a program, so I downloaded Roadkil’s Unstoppable Copier to get all these stubborn files.

Guess what — it worked!! (Okay, I lost a few files, but they weren’t important anyways.)

Windows Crapped Out? Rescue Files With Knoppix

If your Windows won’t boot up — “Config.sys missing” — you’re pretty much screwed. However, you can use Knoppix to rescue important files.

Geek to Live: Rescue files with a boot CD